Here at CloudAve we’re firm believers in the power of collaboration. When Ben became part of a group looking at building a collaborative platform for data sharing for a local Government organization, it seemed logical to approach the project in a similarly collaborative way. Wanting to "eat their own dog food", a joint group of individuals shared in the project; Mike Riversdale, Aaron Brunet and Ben all joined forces to work on a project initiated by a forward thinking local government staffer required to manage an extensive natural resource. The great thing about this particular project is that, without giving specifics out, it seeks to improve the management of a scare natural resource.

So that’s where you, the readers, come in. Part of the project is to look at different collaboration tools that meet the requirements of the project. These requirements are;

Responsive (must appear to the user that the app is local – quick / snappy in operation

Economically priced (ie not free, but not super pricey either)

Now, to be fair, we’ve sort of got the obvious ones covered – Google Apps, Zoho, Microsoft Office Live Workspace (such a snappy line) and the usual suspects – but what are online collaboration tools that you use and can’t believe no-one has ever heard of?

Don’t hold back – TELL US!

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Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

That said, I have found the Mindmeister mindmapping tool (www.mindmeister.com/) works well for me and my experience with the Personal Brain (www.thebrain.com) leads me to believe that the enterprise version would provide a good linking component for the working documents of any common interest group.

Google Wave looks to me the most promissing tool for collaboration between active participants especially as plugins for common working documents become available.

Since you are picking our brains … perhaps a quid pro quo is in order and you will publish your high level conclusions.

Online collaborating and teaching can work, If you have trust and the right tools.
I recently tried http://www.showdocument.com – good app for uploading documents and working on them in real-time.
Most file types are supported and it needs no installation. – andy

One criteria not explicitly stated, but possibly implied, is whether the facility should be SaaS i.e. all-in application and hosting (multi-tenant) or if the absence of this criteria opens up the territory for local installs or an MSP solution.

Perhaps the criteria should also indicate the volume of expected users.

Graham – yes, SaaS was the assumption, but we didn’t want to be closed to other solutions that might meet the criteria. The full criteria list hasn’t been shown, only the ones thought to be show-stoppers.

Further info on users. One scenario is that over time there will be many groups of about 6 or 7 working on related pieces of work. The group members will be widely separated in space (and possibly time), but locally focused on work, data and information. At times some groups will cluster to bring together different units of work relevant to a specific instance of the resource. So this could mean about 30 people interacting online. At other times possibly yearly (as has happened recently) over 300 people will interact – but it is assumed that this would be in the form of a conventional physical workshop/seminar.

A mix of tools is what you might end up needing, which often raises users heckles as they need to remember different passwords. There’s some good frameworks and lessons about selection of activities, process and tools in Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities, see http://technologyforcommunities.com/

You might be interested in the free webinar I’m running sharing a case study of pilot project by Australian and NZ scientists using free-webased tools for conservation planning. NZDT 2pm Monday 23 Nov. More details at: http://bit.ly/1za3gd

Pixetell would be a good one http://www.pixetell.com. It has easy to use multimedia capabilities that combine voice, screen recording, web cam, video, and can include attachments in a secure message viewable with any Web browser. The company just recently released a new version with editing, reuse and added video capabilities http://bit.ly/Tpe2y

My recommendation in regards to functionality, usability, user adoption, turn-key deployment ease, and a player possible that may not be on your usual suspects list – is ThoughtFarmer. IDEO is a reference customer.

Possible non-fit may be a min. of 100 user licences (cira $10K), it’s orientated towards an intranet per user license model. It sits on a MS technology stack and is install only.

At Coherence we looking at setting up an MSP model to enable clients to get the best of both worlds – SaaS qualities like seamless upgrades and dedicated infrastructure resources for security and performance.

Injoos Teamware address all the requirements you have listed and more. Injoos Teamware is a social collaboration platform for businesses and organizations (SAAS + Cloud). We have integrated with Zoho (http://blogs.zoho.com/general/new-zoho-api-partner-injoos) for all the ability to view and edit documents right from the team library. We currently provide unlimited users and multiple sub groups for any organization. Social organizations/NGO/CSOs like WWF, Deepalaya are already on the platform.

We use the HyperOffice Collaboration Suite and I sometimes wonder why it isn’t covered more. It is one of the oldest players in the collaboration space (since 1998) and also one of the most comprehensive with tools for messaging (email, Outlook integration), collaboration (workspaces, document management, project management), online meetings and database applications and web forms.